EE have released an Eagle, a Buzzard, a Kite and an Osprey. Sadly a Vulture is missing from the avian ensemble, but we can let that pass. These are devices rather than birds – the Eagle is a tablet and the other items are portable Wi-Fi hotspots.
The 8-inch Eagle tablet runs Android on a 1.6GHz Balong V9R1 quad-core processor. …

An accused domain slammer with an international footprint has been temporarily suspended by ICANN, more than a decade after the first complaints about its operations.
Brandon Gray Internet Services is accused by ICANN of letting its resellers mine whois for registrant data, which would be used to send “your domain is about to …

Researchers at German security firm Curesec have identified bugs present in most versions of Android that can allow malicious applications to place phone calls, even when they lack the necessary permissions.
By exploiting these vulnerabilities, rogue apps can get up to such mischief as surreptitiously dialing out to expensive …

The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) - which investigates whistleblowers' allegations of organisations and individuals using pirated software - said half of the copyright-infringement claims it dealt with last year that were settled out of court involved Microsoft wares.
The federation today disclosed its stats for the …

Microsoft has today filed 63 lawsuits against online auctioneers in 12 countries who allegedly sold pirated copies of MS software on sites including its own MSN shopping network.
The company said the number of counterfeit Microsoft goods sold online was getting out of hand.
“Dishonest auctioneers are too often using these …

Feature
When the opening line of a conversation starts, “I read an interesting number the other day”, it’s fairly safe to assume that you’re talking to someone whose business it is to know about "interesting numbers". Perhaps unsurprisingly, these words were uttered by an economist whose ability to find god gold in the numbers is the …

Microsoft yesterday confirmed that it has filed 21 civil lawsuits for software piracy in US federal courts against resellers in 14 states.
The tech multinational has slung its latest round of sue balls at resellers, claiming they have used a crafty technique that it likes to refer to as “hard-disk loading”.
It said that the …

How the hell does a virus-infected set of motherboards find their way into the supply chain of a major system vendor? The vendor delivering the bad boards was Dell, and they’re blaming a slipshod supplier and ‘human error’. Yeah – human error. You can read all about it here and here.
The virus in question was a variant of an …

Big box retailer Best Buy has admitted that it sold digital picture frames over the festive period containing malicious software that targets Windows-based PCs.
The US electrical retail giant said that a "limited number" of the LCD panels were "contaminated with a computer virus during the manufacturing process". It sold the 10 …

The Halifax bank is enrolling unsuspecting customers in trials of a new generation of RFID-enabled bank cards, and trying to keep them in the program even if they have mis-givings about the wave and pay technology.
PayWave allows punters to debit their account without having to enter a PIN or sign for goods valued at less than £ …

Following hard on the heels of recent success in the courts against unscrupulous software pirates Novell is now letting its lawyers loose on a New York company accused of copyright infringement false advertising and dilution of trademarks, among other claims. The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern …

A former BT engineer claims that phone hacking is a "disease" within BT and that the telco is failing to protect its customers from premium rate phone scams.
Whistlebower Bob Godsiff was featured earlier this week on a Meridian TV show Cheatlines, in which he claimed that BT was ignoring the growing problem of phone hacking. …

Microsoft is suing three businesses in the US that sold pirated software to thousands of people online via a mammoth spamming operation. The companies sent out 25 million emails worldwide, with legal firms and companies in the public sector among those duped into divulging credit card details online. The companies responsible …

For a story that had more than its fair share of drama this week, it was hard to look further than Microsoft's efforts to get its Office Open XML (OOXML) specification fast-tracked as an ISO standard. Ordinarily, stories about Microsoft and standards tend to be the preserve of bearded men of a particular age, but the OOXML saga …